The Amazing Spider-Man 2

Over-stuffed with plot and consequently struggles to invest the audience in any of it, since there's so much to get through and so many future films and spinoffs to set up.

'The Amazing Spider-Man 2' will certainly make a bazillion dollars, but after you sit through it - all 142 minutes of it - it's very hard to work up a compelling reason that it needed to exist, aside from the aforementioned bazillion dollars.

Despite the efforts of Electro, the franchise is running shockingly low on juice.

Peter's girlfriend Gwen (Emma Stone) [delivers] the "valetudinarian" speech at her school, which feels as empty and platitudinous as the movie. I couldn't help laughing.

About the best thing one can say about this fiasco is that Webb has taken only two films to reach the same exhausted, exhausting endpoint that Raimi required three to achieve. It's progress, of a sort.

This is a movie that needs to remove a piece of jewelry.

Despite the charm and chemistry between the two leads, this attempt to reinvent the series fails to ever justify its own existence.

While The Amazing Spider-Man 2 isn’t that much of an improvement over its predecessor, Jamie Foxx’s Electro (and the craft that accompanied it) was a big boost over how the first film used its villain.



Several of the film’s components work really well while others drag the film down or hinder the storytelling. Perhaps the biggest problem is that the movie tries to cram in too much story and too many characters.

The romantic heart of the film has real potential, but it feels undone by the filmmakers' tireless mission to include the requisite trappings of a superhero epic—every last one of them, no matter how graceless or overcrowded their inclusion may be.